Althea
In the newly funded ALTHEA project, Cyprus University of Technology leads a diverse consortium including 3aHealth Ltd and Birth Forward Cyprus to promote cancer-preventive behaviours in postpartum women. Combining expertise in digital health, behavioural science, and community engagement, the team will develop a smartphone app that uses social connectedness and personalized nudges to encourage breastfeeding, smoking abstinence, and physical activity, grounded in the Social Contagion Theory and the COM-B model.
Publishable Summary:
Population research treats cancer preventive health behaviours as an attribute of individuals but there is increasing evidence that they can spread through social networks. This is referred as the Social Contagion Theory. One group that can benefit from identifying the social contagion of health behaviours are women postpartum who are at risk of cancer because of health behaviour relapse after giving birth. Pregnancy is also a moment where women are motivated to adapt a healthier lifestyle. The ALTHEA project will use a participatory design approach to design and pilot a novel smartphone app that will provide nudges for three disease preventative behaviours: breastfeeding, smoking abstinence and physical activity. During the development (WP3) a systematic review will inform on health behaviours most tractable to improvement through social interactions and mechanisms of interactions and mixed methods studies (interviews, focus groups and feasibility pilot) will be used to provide the guiding principles and test the app. The content will be co-created with a local NGO, women postpartum and experts and based on the COM-B Model. A second feature of the app will be social connectedness so that women who use the app will support each other and hopefully lead to contagion of healthy lifestyles. Social Network Analysis (SNA) will be used to map social interactions (WP4) and identify the contagion of health behaviours according to the relationships between individuals. In addition, a small sub-sample of women participating and using the app will be asked to participate in a small experiment (WP5) to identify whether the positioning of women according to their social interactions in the network can diffuse intervention effects easier and quicker. Evidence generated will inform health service provision and encourage consideration of the behaviours of significant others.
Starting date: June 2025
End date: May 2027
Website: https://althea.3ahealth.com/
The project EXCELLENCE/0524/0549 is co-funded by the European Union and the Republic of Cyprus, through Research and Innovation Foundation.
Co-funded by:
